From the PalFest Bookshelf:

Palestine is everywhere

The latest installment of the PalFest Bookshelf includes Palestine Is Everywhere, an anthology of new writing assembled and edited by Skye Arundhati Thomas and Edwin Nasr.

Vital dispatches from Gaza, essays, poems, protest chronicles, images and letters from prison reflect upon resistance, solidarity and the right to self-determination. Amid a world-historical moment marked by unknowability and loss, this collection offers essential reading for those interested in Palestinian liberation.

Below, you can read an excerpt of the editors’ introduction to Palestine Is Everywhere. And you can find out more about the book, including the other perks of becoming a Bookshelf subscriber, here.

“Speak to Gaza, not just about Gaza,” Mohammed Mhawish, one of this book’s contributors, told us when we first met online. His words became our guiding principle for Palestine is everywhere. Gaza would not be rendered an abstraction, nor would it be engaged as a metaphor. We received diaries, poems, literary texts, and testimony—assertions of collective survival and dignity, recording unutterable cruelty and the steadfast resistance of everyday life. In the war on narrative, nothing stood as firm. The strongest networks of writers, artists, journalists, and photographers have been those mobilized by Gazans. They operate despite blockades, blackouts, and relentless threats to life; they keep record but also accept its terms: there is no easy absolution in documentation. These texts teach us what it means to bear witness, to endure its full, unconsoling weight. Every sentence here has circumvented and outlasted censor, bombardment, and erasure. These are precious acts of resistance, scrupulously observed.

We began late in 2023, as Israel’s machinery of genocide was already turning. We watched—on our phones, flickering in real time—the unspeakable unfold in Gaza, and beyond. What we saw did not always appear on television, and almost never in the newspapers. The footage did not match the official reports. What we glimpsed—collapsed buildings, children pulled from rubble—failed to appear in the evening news. US-led propaganda dismissed these images. The lies were flagrant, but the resolve of those who told them held. Institutions fell into line. Dissent was censored, fear instilled, and solidarity criminalized.

How do we move through a world that not only watches but enables— even lends itself—to genocide? There are no easy reckonings. To speak of Palestinian resistance and self-determination in their full, tangled complexity has become difficult, risky, and illegal. Slogans are banned; individuals pulled into prison for uttering them at protests. Historical analogies spark infighting, reinforce dominant frameworks, and demand that Palestinians perform their suffering in ways legible, and palatable, to the very powers enabling their erasure. Discourse, however well-meaning, is forced to contort itself to appease Zionist plotlines. The burden of proof remains, as always, on the subjugated. Writing and reading—skills we studied and cultivated in ourselves—have become contested ground. They do not always illuminate; they sometimes obscure, widening the distance between Gaza and the world that claims to study it, and the world that stands in solidarity.

There was something we returned to often: what to do with the collapse of language in the face of atrocity? Again, Gaza guided us. Poet and novelist Nasser Rabah places together the absurdity of writing amid genocide, “a sin without pleasure,” alongside its necessity, “Who will wash the final words of the dead from the heart doctors’ hands?”

Artist and teacher Maisara Baroud sent us a drawing of Gaza from Gaza, visualizing the forceful division of the north and south. In “Hunger,” writer, editor, and poet Muhammad al-Zaqzouq is precise and unsparing. A family struggles to find fire to make bread, surviving on tea and shared biscuits— starvation weaponizes daily life. The poet and web programmer Anees Ghanima places poems, conversations, and witness accounts together in a single, breathtaking text. A man serenely smokes an empty pipe outside his tent; a father tells his son his mother is dead; a buried victim stops screaming on the second day. The writing is alive with acts of defiance: a shared song, a nighttime political debate, a window opened to spit on the world.

Learn more about the book, and subscribe to the PalFest Bookshelf, here.

OXFORD: Tamim al-Bargouthi’s Gilgamesh, The Epic, 19 November

For the first time in the United Kingdom: Tamim al-Barghouti will present his re-writing of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Arabic verse.

In the face of the deluge of mass death in Palestine, and stemming from his own personal loss, the “Poet of Jerusalem”, Tamim al-Barghouti, presents his rewriting of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh in Arabic verse.

!غنّ، عن الذي رأى كل شيء

Tamim Al-Barghouti is one of the Arab world’s most renowned poets, his poems read and viewed by hundreds of millions across the region, recited by people rising up in the streets of Cairo in 2011 to those resisting the latest onslaught on Gaza.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest poem known to man, the oldest piece of secular literature, and “a manifesto of rebellion against the gods”.

Join us in Oxford for this unmissable premiere, a single performance of an ancient epic, which will be followed by a Q&A with the poet.

The performance will be in Arabic, the discussion afterwards in both Arabic and English.

Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From Selected by Frieze as a Top Artwork of the 21st Century

In 2001, Palestinian artist Emily Jacir asked Palestinians unable to enter to Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, as well as Palestinians in those three places whose movements are restricted, “If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?”

For the next six months, using the freedom of movement afforded by her American passport, she did her best to fulfill their requests, documenting her attempts in text and photos. One man asked her to visit his mother; another asked for a photo of his family (they gave her strawberries and lemons grown on their land to take back to him). A third asked her to pick an orange in Jericho and eat it (this, she was unable to do). The resulting work, Where We Come From, was named by Frieze this October as one of the top 25 artworks of the 21st century.

In their citation, Frieze wrote, “Where We Come From is a vital artwork that asks us to interrogate the quotidian privileges afforded to so many of us in this century and demands that we not look away when confronted with the discrimination and violence enacted upon so many others.” Read the full citation here.

Edward Said wrote of the artwork, in the last piece of writing he published before his passing: “[Jacir’s] compositions slip though the nets of bureaucracies and nonnegotiable borders, time and space, in search not of grandiose dreams or clotted fantasies, but rather of humdrum objects and simple gestures like visits, hugs, watering a tree, eating a meal—the kinds of things that maybe all Palestinians will be able to do someday.”

You can read the rest of Said’s reflections on Where We Come From here. Emily Jacir is founder and director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, an arts initiative located in Bethlehem. You can find out more about Dar Jacir here, and keep up with Emily’s work on her Instagram.

LOS ANGELES: Tareq Baconi’s Fire In Every Direction with Robin D. G. Kelley, 21 November

Join Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena on November 21 for a conversation with Tareq Baconi and Robin D. G. Kelley about Baconi’s new memoir, Fire in Every Direction.

Both a love story and a coming-of-age tale that spans countries and continents, Fire in Every Direction balances humor and loss, nostalgia and hope, as it takes us from the Middle East to London, and from 1948 to the present. Tareq Baconi crafts a deeply intimate, unforgettable portrait of how a political consciousness—desire and resistance—is passed down through generations.

Find out more and reserve your free ticket here.

Book of the Week

Earlier this year, a collective based in Aotearoa New Zealand launched Al-Rifaq, a new platform to make Arabic political commentary, analysis, and theory accessible to Western and English-speaking readership.

Al-Rifaq publishes a translation of a new piece every other week on their Substack, with a focus on contemporary or recent analysis produced by the radical left and revolutionary currents of Palestine and the Arab world. This focus is based on a belief that the ongoing and unfolding war on the region is of world historical significance, and that the time is ripe for a renewed internationalist ethos and orientation in political organising, as evidenced by the worldwide Palestine solidarity movement.

Building on their successes online, Al-Rifaq is now publishing its first book, Of Weapons and Words, a small book of six translated essays of political commentary and analysis on Palestine and the wider region. The book features previously published essays by Mousa Alsadah, Sari Orabi, and Nidal Khalaf, but it also includes freshly translated texts by Amer Mohsen and Abdaljawad Omar, as well as a discussion between professors from Birzeit University in response to the ongoing war: Vivian Aqiqi with Abaher El-Sakka, Lena Meari, and Mudar Kassis.

Al-Rifaq have also got some book bundle deals, and all proceeds go to commissioning more work from translators in and connected to Gaza, Palestine.

Preorders are now live for Of Weapons and Words. Get your own copy, and support the work of Al-Rifaq, here.

Media Roundup

I Left My Sorrows in the Laundry Basin – A new poem from Haidar al-Ghazali, translated by Omar Berrada: “Tomorrow the bulldozer will dredge the grave / that lies quietly beneath a scorched tree / as though the war had ended / There are no roses on its headstone / no place to rest a hand / it will spend the night like any other night / waiting for someone to visit / in the morning.”

The Palestine-Mexico Border – On the Turbulence Podcast, Séamus Malekafzali and Dylan Saba speak to Alexander Aviña to discuss Israel’s Cold War involvement in Latin America, the invention of “narcoterrorism,” and the potential for solidarity between the pro-Palestine and anti-ICE movements.

The New Politics of Permanent Occupation – Maheera Munir examines parallels between the Israeli occupation of Jammu and Kashmir, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, as projects of territorial re-engineering built on fascist nationalisms and religious pretexts. 

Two New Poems by Marah Muhammad Al-Khatib – Two poems from the Gazan poet Marah Muhammad Al-Khatib, translated by Layla Salma: “When I die, / Do not lay me with the rest. / Place me among roses, / So my torn hope might heal, / And my blood‑bright soul / Might finally rest. / I write / So my vision / Won’t dissolve / In twenty days.”

Two Years of Genocide – Writing from Gaza, Sondos Sabra looks back on the past two years to examine all that Israel has stolen from the people of Gaza, and how that has changed her.

The Disaster Correspondent – Lina Mounzer describes how she, as a Lebanese writer, was conscripted by the New York Times to narrate disaster in the Middle East even as the Times sought to obfuscate the culpability of structures and systems, and how this dynamic has marked the coverage of the genocide in Gaza over the past two years. 

The Grammar of Power: On Journalism, Grief, and the Stories That Break Us – Adam Makary describes how, even despite growing up as an Arab in the United States, he sees the moral center of American journalism as having shifted since October 7.

We Will Not Stop, We Will Not Rest: Repression and Resistance from Berlin to New York – Cameron Jones compares the Palestine solidarity movements in New York and Berlin, alongside the common practices of state repression across both contexts.

No End to Genocide – Qasem Waleed El-Farra argues that the ceasefire agreement has enabled Israel to continue killing with impunity, allowing it “to do what it does best: stall, manipulate and deceive.” 

The Illusion of a Gaza Ceasefire – “The illusion of a ceasefire,” writes Issam Adwan, “is perhaps more cruel than war itself. It dangles the promise of safety, of renewal, of return—then shatters it with another blast.”

How Israel's Unrestrained Brutality Signals the Beginning of Its End – Examining the racist and genocidal discourse circulating in the highest levels of the Israeli government, Majd Assadi argues that these discourses demonstrate the Israeli state’s “strategic weakness.” 

We Palestinians Exist Somewhere Between Fear and Faith in the Holy Land – Returning to her family’s village in the West Bank, Kholood Eid documents the precarity of life there, with settler violence on the rise and against the backdrop of genocide.

How Israel’s “Forgotten” 1956 Occupation of Gaza Echoes In Its Actions Today – Anne Irfan compares Israel’s first invasion of Gaza in 1956 to the present moment in order to demonstrate how national security concerns in Israel are enabled by imperial designs on the region. 

Scotland Says No to Genocide – Claire Biddles reports on the opening of Palestine Museum Scotland in Edinburgh, characterizing the new museum as a testament to the rising tide of Palestine solidarity in Scotland, where BDS and PACBI have gained new purchase.

Two Poems – Two poems by Eman Abdelhadi: “Don’t our children make pretty figures? / Would you like them in short clips? / One minute? Two minutes? Three? / Would you like them as photos? / Lines and lines of crisp white cotton? / Or before they are scrubbed clean / Bones bereft of flesh?/  Should we present them to you / In rubble or in blood?” 

‘Rewaa, My Beloved…’: New Poetry by Asmaa Dwaima – Asmaa Dwaima writes an ode to her sister, who was martyred three months ago, along with her son: “This is an image I refuse to see, lest it tarnish the radiant, childlike image of you that lives in my mind. / I long—so desperately—to preserve you, with your spontaneity, your defiance, your hunger for life, even if all I have left to live on are memories, a few photos, and fragments of happy videos.” 

Three Poems by Fady Joudah – New poems by Fady Joudah: “You are bombing the sea. / Did the fish declare / they’re Palestinian, too?”

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